Cops, hops and fish

Broken Lizard wash down Beerfest and
Super Troopers with The Slammin’ Salmon

FISH STORY: The Slammin’ Salmon

by ERIK LEIJON

To any Montrealer who has made the automotive trek down the I-87 to New York City or traversed the nauseatingly green I-89 through New England to Boston, the opening scene of Super Troopers likely stands as the best thing the Broken Lizard sketch comedy team has ever committed to tape.

It's no surprise, then, that it was inspired by a real-life ill-fated jaunt to Montreal from Vermont. Although the trip was not made personally by any members of the Broken Lizard crew, the story has been retold enough times through the five members of the sketch comedy-turned-filmmaking troupe—Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Paul Soter, Steve Lemme and Erik Stolhanske—that perhaps the finer details of the event in question have become cloudy. Heffernan, who played the dopey turncoat Rod Farva in Super Troopers and the ironically murdered beer chugger Landfill in Beerfest, recalls a group including Chandrasekhar and a few others getting pulled over on a beer run to our fair country. “I played rugby for Colgate University,” Heffernan adds. “And we did make the trip up to Montreal for some tournament, and there were a lot of strip clubs involved.” Paul Soter, the redhead known for playing the more sane characters, recalls the movie intro playing largely true to the real story, with a group of friends carrying considerable amounts of weed and mushrooms driving to a friend’s cabin for a party

But Broken Lizard founder Jay Chandrasekhar has the most vivid account of what actually transpired. “What it really came from was, some guys were going from Vermont into Canada to go to Club Super Sexe or wherever for a bachelor party,” he says. “It was two brothers with two other guys. They were in a van driving into Canada and every car in front of them was being pulled over and searched.

“They knew they had enough mushrooms on them for four people, so they were kind of panicking. Quietly, one of the guys just said, ‘Fuck it,’ and ate all the mushrooms at once. So then, sure enough, they get pulled over and the Canadian Mounties, I assume, searched the van and they found half a joint. No one would admit to it being theirs, so they put all four guys into lockup, where they sat for a few hours while this kid tripped his skull off. Finally the older brother told the cops the joint was his, and according to the story, he was banned from Canada.”

BOOZING BUFFOONS: (l to r) Erik Stolhanske,
Steve Lemme, Kevin Heffernan,
Jay Chandrasekhar and Paul Soter in Beerfest

Cult of personal history
Chandrasekhar missed the bachelor party, although, coming back from the wedding, he observed the Vermont State Highway Patrol making transgressing motorists squirm in their car seats, providing the basis for the rest of Super Troopers. The personal storytelling element of Broken Lizard’s comedy is what separates these Colgate grads from your typical trendy pop culture-mining comics. Super Troopers and Beerfest may not be to everyone’s liking, but like their sketch comedy idols Monty Python, those films have a certain timeless quality because, as Chandrasekhar puts it, “We’re fans of writing about what you know.”

“Not to sound pompous about it, but a movie like Super Troopers tends to stick around for a while because the jokes don’t become dated or stale,” says Soter. “The movie has a cult following because it’s been passed around for a few years. I was working on a script with a guy who had a great joke about [disgraced former Illinois governor] Rod Blagojevich, and I thought, I hope to God Blagojevich isn’t part of the national consciousness in 10 years.”

Having formed in college and spending their early post-grad years trying to catch a break in New York City’s competitive live comedy circuit, those formative years of hanging out, drinking and partying were the most creatively stimulating for the group even after moving to Los Angeles and becoming entrenched in the movie and television industries. Their latest independent comedic romp, The Slammin’ Salmon, harkens back to Chandrasekhar, Lemme and Stolhanske’s days of waiting tables at a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The movie stars the Lizards as waiters working at a Miami fish restaurant owned by unscrupulous former heavyweight boxing champ Cleon Salmon, played by the always intimidating Michael Clarke Duncan. One night, Salmon pits the waiters against each other, rewarding whoever brings in the most money.

“The six of us who worked at that restaurant,” recalls Chandrasekhar, “we were all good friends and we were the entire waiting staff. It was great because we’d be joking and drinking the whole time, and at the end of the night, we’d collectively have $200 in tips so we would hit the bars and drink more. It was at one of those bars where they had a boot we would try to chug out of, and we learned you had to turn the boot in order to manipulate the air bubble that would build, which we ended up using in Beerfest.”

“We wanted a crazy series of events that happened over one night,” says Soter. “So there isn’t a ton of autobiographical material, but more the little touches, like the little interactions with customers, came from the guys’ experiences. But the scenario itself is clearly a fictional construct.”

Back to indie
The Slammin’ Salmon marks a return to independent filmmaking after two big studio releases. In 2007, with the Writers’ Guild of America strike looming, Broken Lizard quickly completed their script and cobbled enough cash together to begin filming just as the strike took effect. Because of the time constraints, the film’s premise of taking place in one locale over one night was an effective way of keeping the film on the cheap.

Being legally unable to edit the script during the strike, the team improvised a lot more than usual with the cameras rolling, also buoyed by the fact that having only one set to deal with meant less time spent hustling from location to location.

Now back on the independent film circuit selling the movie, the troupe has returned to their roots, attending film festivals and doing a sketch comedy tour for the first time since earning success on the big screen. As self-made men in the comedy world, promoting their films has become as intrinsic to the artistic process as actually making them. Selling their movies has also proven to be creatively stimulating: it was during the promotion of Super Troopers that they got the idea to make Beerfest. At a beer garden in Australia, the comics were presented to the locals as “five comedians from America.” Needless to say, they were quickly forced to prove their drinking mettle against the proud, Foster’s-chugging natives.

No more drinking, please
The Lizards are still reeling from their cross-America tour for 2006’s Beerfest, where their publicist had the understandable but careless idea to have them play drinking games in various U.S. college towns. “You’d literally get off the bus and someone would have a bicycle pump of beer ready to pour into your mouth,” says Soter. “Thirty ounces of beer straight down your gullet right as you walk into the door.

“They split us up so we could cover more cities, so I’d see Steve and Erik after not having seen them for a week and they’d look like they had just come from the battlefield. Red eyes and 20-mile stares.”

Thanks to Beerfest’s following among male college students, Soter says none of the members can enter a bar to this day without being swarmed by “20-year-old dudes with backwards baseball caps, walking towards you with shots of Jägermeister.” They’ve all learned to cheat on taking shots, otherwise, Soter says, they would have succumbed to alcohol poisoning ages ago. “Working with Johnny Knoxville on Dukes of Hazzard, he was the master of doing shots with people and throwing them over the shoulder into a potted plant.”

The Broken Lizard team are hoping the restaurant-themed The Slammin’ Salmon will result in a less destructive promotional tour, since they’ll need to save their bodies for an upcoming pot-based Broken Lizard feature, which they’re currently writing.